By any typical measure, Mary Kay Zuravleff’s The Frequency of Souls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages, $ 23) is not a very good book. A tale of love, death, and refrigerators, this short first novel by a thirty- six-year-old former editor at the Smithsonian is not so much full of holes as full of protuberances: little knobs of irrelevant metaphor, subplot, and character that scrape and rattle as the story rolls along. The author has an uncertain ear, and at least once a chapter the narrating voice goes badly out of tune. (The book ends with a sentence — “The rubbery skin resisted the initial pressure of his molars and then burst open to his insistent bite, inviting him to eat of the cool, refreshing fruit” — that I had to read three times before I could believe she meant it.) Like those comedians who nudge you after they tell a joke, Zuravleff can’t just use her symbolic devices: She has to explain them in case somebody missed the point. Her grasp of structure is shaky, and her sense of plot development a little weak.
In fact, while The Frequency of Souls is not a terrible novel, it falls so demonstrably short that the only interesting question I could find to ask is why I loved the book so much — why I read it in a single sitting, smiling the whole time, and why I’ve recommended it a dozen times in the days since I finished.
Some people read in order to have something to say and some people read because reading is something they’re good at — and they will perhaps not know what I mean. But others read because reading pleases them, and these readers will understand when I say that what makes The Frequency of Souls run is its author’s exuberant, gratuitous joy in telling a story. Mary Kay Zuravleff has written a genuinely happy book, the readers’ novel of the year. To complain too much about its flaws is like complaining that P. G. Wodehouse only wrote melodramas or that The Count of Monte Cristo could use some editing.
The novel’s hero, George Mahoney, is a handsome man in his late thirties, a design engineer at a refrigerator company where he thinks up such improvements as the self-defrosting freezer, the magnetic lock, and the built-in icemaker. His life can’t be called bad. He has a pair of good kids in school, one charming and the other overweight but smart. His wife is a little domineering — every morning, she leaves two notes on the fridge, one outlining George’s day and the other instructing her son to call George and read him the first note. But she’s pretty in a Georgia- belle, southern sorority-sister sort of way, and she makes good money selling real estate in the D.C. suburbs. In fact, there’s nothing much wrong with George, except that he has always been something of a refrigerated man and in recent years he’s grown a little heavy. Like the bulky, outdated brand of machine on which he works, what George really needs is a redesign, but it’s cheaper and easier just to keep patching up the existing icebox.
Enter Niagara Spense, George’s new lab partner. As the novel opens, “the Veteran,” George’s long-disliked partner, has been forcibly retired and replaced with Niagara, a rangy, over-sized, half-deaf product of Cal Tech. Niagara is in search of what every “gangly girl scientist” needs: financing and a lab of her own. What she really wants is to speak to ghosts, but she’s been forced to take a job in refrigerator design after she spent all her money on scanning equipment to find the “frequency of souls” — the radio bandwidths on which she claims the dead still chatter to one another late at night. With her hearing aid, costume jewelry, and home-stitched dresses made from sofa upholstery, Niagara is young, instinctively wise, interestingly ugly, and just what the frigid George needs to warm up his leftover life.
The romance between a refrigeration engineer and a gushing Niagara makes no more than a passable frame for a novel, though Zuravleff gives it at least one unexpected twist in interrupting the sex scene novelists seem to think mandatory nowadays. But, for the most part, she never strays far from a predictable course; this sort of romance has, after all, been written many times before. In plot and design, The Frequency of Souls reads as though the author spent too much time with Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist before sitting down to write a D.C.-based version of Tyler’s “strong, intuitive woman in Baltimore revives overly rational, emotionally deadened (but handsome) man” novel. “Ever since he had built his first radio set,” the book begins, “George Mahoney remained convinced that the universe was soldered together with logic.”
But there’s nothing wrong with a predictable story frame, and it’s all the extraneous material Zuravleff hangs on the frame that makes her novel fun anyway. She knows so much about refrigerators, and she’s so in love with their symbolic power, that she can’t stop herself from working them in everywhere she can. When George’s son enters his school’s science fair, she seizes her chance to design a project involving sound waves, coolant gases, and refrigerated grapes. When the old Veteran on his deathbed demands cryogenic freezing, she gets to show how the dead can be preserved. (Though when she has one character at the Veteran’s funeral say, “His desire to be frozen is rather ironic,” and another gasp, “Oh my God! Refrigerators and frozen, I just got it,” I had to stifle the urge to hunt the author down and whack her upside the head.)
There’s information here on how to blow up an apple, how electronics influences music, and how a telegraph works. There’s electricity in the wires and electricity in the characters, souls coming alive in radio waves and souls coming alive in bodies. The Frequency of Souls is an awkward and aggravatingly overloaded little book. It’s been a long time since I enjoyed reading anything half so much.
By J. Bottum
